Ennead

The Ennead or Great Ennead was a group of nine deities in Egyptian mythology worshipped at Heliopolis: the sun god Atum; his children Shu and Tefnut; their children Geb and Nut; and their children Osiris, Isis, Set, and Nephthys. The Ennead sometimes includes Horus the Elder; an ancient form of the falcon god, not the son of Osiris and Isis. The Great Ennead was only one of several such groupings of nine deities in ancient Egypt. Claims to preeminence made by its Heliopolitan priests were not respected throughout Egypt, as each nome typically had its own local deities, whose priests insisted stood above all others; even in the nearby city of Memphis, which along with Heliopolis is contained within the limits of modern Cairo, the priests of Ptah celebrated him as singularly superior to the Nine — In addition to Memphis having its own creation myth, the contemporaneous city of Hermopolis had another creation story, the Ogdoad, that accounted for the physical creation of the universe by eight (different) primordial gods. The English name ennead is a borrowing via Latin of the Greek name enneás (ἐννεάς), meaning "the nine". The term was a calque of the Egyptian name, written psḏt and also meaning "the Nine". Its original pronunciation is uncertain, since hieroglyphs do not record vowels, but may have been /piˈsiːcʼat/ in Old Egyptian, /piˈsiːtʼaʔ/ in Middle Egyptian, and /pəˈsiːtʼə/ in Late Egyptian. Egyptologists conventionally transcribe it as Pesedjet. The ancient Egyptians created several enneads as their unification under Dynasty I brought numerous local cults into contact with one another. The ancient Egyptian mythology often had many different explanations for the same phenomenon.